Keep on Smiling: An Investigation of the Influence of the Use of Emoticons by Chatbots on User Satisfaction

Most of us have chatted with a chatbot before and remember frustrating experiences. Research shows that friendly and empathetic communication can compensate for existing communication problems. We therefore conducted a study to investigate whether the use of emoticons leads to higher user satisfaction when communicating with a chatbot. The use case was a chatbot recommending courses on a German e-learning platform. The results did not reach significance, but show a positive trend, which leads to indications of what future research should investigate.